Simon Wiesenthal was history’s great Nazi hunter, but as Tom Segev, columnist for Haaretz and author of the new book,Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, notes that he actually hated the term. Wiesenthal, who was a prisoner at several concentration camps and lost 89 members of his and his wife’s family in the Holocaust, founded the Jewish Documentation Centre and helped track down some 1,000 war criminals in a period lasting more than four decades. Segev’s masterful work examines Wiesenthal from all angles, and though he’s on a grueling book tour he kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the book from Britannica Executive Editor Michael Levy.

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Britannica: Simon Wiesenthal is remembered as history’s great “Nazi hunter.” During the Holocaust some 89 members of his and his wife’s family were killed. How did this experience and his personality lead him to devote his life to tracking down Nazis?

Segev: Wiesenthal’s personal experiences during the war, including the loss of many members of his and his wife’s family, naturally contributed to his involvement in the “hunt” for Nazi criminals after the war. But “hunting” Nazis was not a personal vendetta. In fact Wiesenthal hated the term “Nazi hunter.” He objected to any form of “man hunt” or unauthorized acts of revenge. As a student, before the war, he had already been active in Zionist politics and he adhered to the principles of European liberalism, including the liberal system of justice.

The hope that the Nazis would be brought to justice accompanied him while he was imprisoned in five concentration camps. His first list of Nazi criminals was ready within less than three weeks after his liberation, in May 1945. For the next 60 years he continued the search for Nazi criminals, an activity that demanded great courage and unrelenting inner conviction. But Wiesenthal was a tragic hero. Other Holocaust survivors were able to make new beginnings; Wiesenthal was not. The Holocaust continued to torment him until the end of his life, a haunted man rather than a “hunter”.

Britannica: You recount in your book an event in Tel Aviv in 1949 when Wiesenthal organized a funeral procession and burial of the remains in a five-foot glass box of what was said to be the ashes of some 200,000 people murdered in the Holocaust. Can you describe this event and how it elevated Wiesenthal’s public persona?

Segev: The procession began in Tel Aviv, on June 26, 1949. The newspapers reported that there were tens of thousands present and described heartbreaking scenes. In the main hall of the synagogue, there stood a glass box, five feet long. In it were 30 porcelain urns, painted with blue and white stripes. According to the newspapers, they contained the ashes of 200,000 Jews who had been murdered in the Holocaust.

The box was taken to Jerusalem, and at the entrance to the city there were once again thousands, waiting and weeping. Some of them brought bars of soap. They mistakenly believed that the soap had been made out of the bodies of Jews and wanted to bury it with the glass box.

The man who organized this historic spectacle was Simon Wiesenthal, then 41 years old and living in Austria. Not many Israelis knew him. The mayor of Tel Aviv, for one, didn’t know who he was when Wiesenthal first contacted him, in Yiddish, a few months before. But the mayor seems to have been impressed by Wiesenthal’s assertive style. It was more like an order than a query, request, or suggestion: the Association of Former Concentration Camp Inmates in Austria had decided to transfer the ashes of the martyrs to Israel and to honor the city of Tel Aviv by making it the recipient, Wiesenthal wrote. There was no way to refuse, and the mayor replied that Tel Aviv would accept the urns with a “tremor of sanctity,” although he had no idea what to do with them. He was not the only one.

In 1949, nobody in Israel really knew the right way to go about mourning six million dead or how to perpetuate their memory. By bringing the ashes of the victims to Jerusalem for burial, Wiesenthal was demanding of the Israelis that they at long last confront the Holocaust, in the same way that in days to come he was to demand it of the other nations of the world. Wiesenthal was very emotional. “As I followed the box of ashes,” he wrote, “I saw my mother’s face the way it looked the last time I saw her on that fateful day when I left home in the morning for forced labor outside the ghetto.”

Britannica: In Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust there was an uneasy relationship between the survivors of the Holocaust and those Israelis who had settled there prior to World War II. You talk about the survivors being shunned and being viewed negatively. Why was this the case and how did it manifest itself?

Segev: When Wiesenthal came to Israel, the Holocaust was still wrapped in silence. Parents never told their children what they had experienced; the children never dared to ask. Holocaust survivors made people flinch with anxiety, embarrassment, and feelings of guilt.

Many of the Israelis who had settled in the country before World War II, or were born there, tended to relate condescendingly to Holocaust victims and survivors. They were despised for their weakness, because most of them had not fought against the Nazis but had gone to their deaths “like lambs to the slaughter.” Many Holocaust survivors found neither a sympathetic ear nor any compassion; often they were not even believed when they related what had happened to them.

For their part, the survivors had plenty to say to the Israelis. Why, they would ask, had the Zionist movement not made greater efforts to rescue them from the Nazis? Implicit in this question was a terrible accusation.

The survivors were not easy to live with: How can you share an apartment building with them, work with them, go to the movies or the beach with them? How can you fall in love with them and marry them? How can their children go to school with yours? It’s doubtful that any other society ever faced so difficult or painful an encounter with “the Other,” to use a phrase that came into currency later.

Britannica: Wiesenthal was criticized by many Jews for his association with and refusal to condemn Kurt Waldheim, the one-time UN secretary-general who in 1986 was elected president of Austria despite revelations that he had played a role in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps—an association that likely cost Wiesenthal the Nobel Prize in 1986 (it was thought he and Elie Wiesel would share the award that year). Was this criticism fair and what impact did the Nobel snub have on Wiesenthal?

Segev: Wiesenthal had many admirers and many enemies. Some of his worst enemies were Jews, such as officials of the World Jewish Congress, who accused Wiesenthal of “betrayal” for not supporting their campaign against Waldheim. Back in 1971 Wiesenthal had promised the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith that Waldheim’s past was clean and that could serve as Secretary General of the United Nations. Years later it turned out that Waldheim had lied about his role in the war, although no active participation in war crimes were proven. Wiesenthal was shocked to find that Waldheim had lied to him. Trying to defend his own reputation, he refused to join the campaign against Waldheim. He also actively helped Waldheim to defend himself. It was a grave mistake, which cost Wiesenthal many of his admirers. There is reason to believe that had he participated in the campaign against Waldheim, he may have received the Nobel Peace Prize, which went to Elie Wiesel.

Britannica: Your biography of Wiesenthal runs nearly 500 pages, but if you could summarize briefly Wiesenthal the man and how we should remember, how would you do it?

Segev: The drama of Simon Wiesenthal’s life is stored in hundreds of files containing some 300,000 pieces of paper. The first file begins in 1945, when he was a walking skeleton, weighing 97 pounds, who had just been liberated from Mauthausen concentration camp, with no hope and no future. About 60 feet down on the same shelf, there is a file from the 1980s, containing the following handwritten note: “Darling Simon, Take good care of yourself and stay happy. I love you and we all need you, Elizabeth Taylor.”

A tireless warrior against evil and a central figure in the struggle for human rights, Wiesenthal enjoyed worldwide admiration. American presidents hosted him in the White House; Hollywood adopted him as a cultural hero. One of the officials of the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles observed that if he had not existed, Wiesenthal would have had to be invented, because people all over the world, both Jews and gentiles, needed him as an emblem and a source of hope: A lone Jew, he had taken it upon himself to make sure that even the last of the Nazis would not die free, and justice would prevail.

A quixotic romantic with a James Bond image and a soaring ego, a tendency to fantasize, and a penchant for crude jokes in Yiddish, he was a brave man who launched some breathtaking ventures, involving efforts to prosecute hundreds of Nazi criminals. For years he worked in collaboration with Israel’s secret intelligence agency, the Mossad. As early as 1953 he was able to inform the Israeli government, correctly, that the most notorious Nazi criminal still at large, Adolf Eichmann, was hiding in Argentina. Seven years later Eichmann was brought to justice in Jerusalem.

Wiesenthal’s faith in the liberal system of justice was part of a broad, humanistic concept of the Holocaust, regarding it first and foremost a crime against humanity. Wiesenthal understood the extermination of the Jews as part of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against other groups, such as incurable invalids, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Once, he said, he imagined meeting with the victims in heaven, and he was determined to say only four words, “I didn’t forget you,” the phrase that became his personal motto. Indeed more than anything else, Wiesenthal deserves to be remembered for his contribution to the culture of Holocaust memory and the belief that remembering the dead is sanctifying life. Nobody did more than he did in this respect.